A: Airblogging.com is a service that allows users to make text and/or photo entries to their weblogs. To use it, you need to have a weblog, and a mobile phone.

Q: How do I get a weblog?

A: You can sign up for a free weblog at blogger or LiveJournal. You can also try TypePad for free for 30 days. Thereafter, it is $4.95 a month. LiveJournal and blogger also offer premium services for a small fee.

If you own a domain, have proper administrative access to the machine, and are either a tech-head or somewhat adventurous, you can install Six Apart's blogging software: Movable Type. MT will give you the most control over your weblog, but you have to put in some effort.

Q: What is a photoblog?

A: Basically, it is a picture journal/weblog. As airblogging.com focuses on posting from your phone, most users are either mobile photobloggers (some call them 'mophobloggers', but enough with the contractions already), or if they just post text, then mobile bloggers (or 'mobloggers'...I know, I know).

A: If your phone supports sending SMS to an email address, or can send email, then you can use airblogging.com. While we have the ability to accept SMS posts to phone numbers, we haven't made that function public yet.

Once you have a weblog via one of the software/hosting platforms listed above, simply sign up. Be sure to read the note for any particular field on the signup form by clicking the link to the right. This will usually explain the information that is expected of you. Assuming all the information is correct, you should be able to start posting photos and/or text right away.

Q: What about MMS?

A: We will be adding support for MMS in the near future.

Q: I set all my account prefs up correctly, and I send an sms/email to your server, but it won't update my blog/journal. Discuss:

A: Unfortunately, mobile carriers and handset manufacturers don't exactly adhere to a message formatting standard. Nevertheless, we are constantly debugging all the various types of message formats we receive, and support is continuing to broaden.
Also, you might be one of those tricky types who set up your phone to identify the reply email as "something@vtext.com" instead of your number.
We should probably add a pref for that, soon.
This has been added,
with one outstanding bug that should get resolved this weekend.
(see news and updates on the ABOUT page).

Q: I sent an SMS post from my phone, but I never got a confirmation. What up with that?

A: SMS is not as reliable as the internet. Depending on your carrier, failure rates can be as high as 15% percent. Newer phones with GSM/GPRS data capabilities are more dependable for messaging (email) and SMS transactions.

Q: Are you saying I should buy a new phone? What are you, a handset manufacturer?

A: If only. We want to build better services for nextgen handsets. SMS is just a lowest-common-denominator method. Userbase increase is good for the obvious reasons. Also, it's hard to test 2.5G and 3G handsets when we don't have the dev kits and our friends don't have the phones. So, yes, go buy a P800, then make friends with us.

Q: I got a message that my post failed, but when I got home it was there. Why you wanna front like that?

A: Sometimes, the response code from the server gets around even the most sophisticated regex. We are evolving this as quickly as possible, and will make improvements as problems reveal themselves.

Q: I use blogger and I am hosted at blogspot. Every time I post a photo, it just posts the text and not the picture.

A: Unfortunately, the blogger API does not support the remote posting of photos for free users hosted on blogspot. We are finishing up a workaround for this limitation, which should be available soon (for blogspot and self-hosted users). And that workaround is done. We will host photos for blogger users. And LiveJournal users as well.